Tina Mcelroy Ansa (14 page)

So, even when he was old, sick and dying, Lena knew she had to be careful that the times she pressed her hands to his skin, his hair, his nails, his frame, that the touch felt casual, familial. The way it always had.

“I just thought you’d like some more company. That’s all,” Lena continued, trying to speak breezily.

“Company?” Frank said derisively. “What company? You ain’t never home as it is.”

“Well, I plan to start doing more of my work right around here,” she said, picking up things around the room and putting them down. She had never been nervous around Frank Petersen a day in her life. Not even when he showed up the first evening at her parents’ house in Pleasant Hill with a case of Coca-Colas from The Place and began washing the dinner dishes because her mother needed some help.

Frank Petersen had stayed on working four or five days a week for a bit more than thirty years to take care of the house on Forest Avenue,
washing dishes, taking down drapes for cleaning, changing bed linen and mopping floors for the McPhersons until Lena built her own house.

In Lena’s mind, there was nothing odd about a man taking care of her household. Other than her mother and grandmother, that’s all she had ever known.

There was something about one woman taking care of another woman’s household, her duties, the washing of her drawers, that stood in the way of Lena being able to live freely. She couldn’t say why she wasn’t a bit disturbed by the idea of Frank Petersen washing and hanging and folding her intimate apparel and cleaning up after her and her family all those years or of James, for all practical purposes a stranger to Lena when he came, picking up his brother’s duties as if he had been doing them all his life.

Frank Petersen had made sure before she noticed the deterioration in his health that she would be the executrix of his estate, such as it was. He had just wanted her to know his life.

When Frank Petersen’s health began to fail seriously, she had tried to hire one of the women she had known for years down at The Place to take over his duties. But the business relationship, begun in friendship and cordiality, always ended in hurt feelings and animosity. Lena just wanted her house cleaned, her windows scrubbed, her bathroom smelling like eucalyptus oil, the fruit and vegetable drawer in her refrigerator clean enough to eat out of because late at night when she came home tired and weary, she sometimes did. And she was happy to pay more than most schoolteachers made. But try as she did, over and over, she couldn’t find a black female housekeeper who gave
her
any respect in her own house. She tried to hire customers from The Place. It didn’t work. She tried to hire daughters and cousins and nieces and daughters-in-law of her patrons and friends. It didn’t work. She even tried to hire anonymous women from employment services. And that didn’t work either.

They left trash, big actual chunks of trash—bottle caps and the dead leaves of plants and dust bunnies—in the corners of her house.
They cleaned the bathroom and left fingerprints on the mirror and globs of toothpaste dried to the sink basin and hair in the tub. They let mildew grow in the grout of her steam room even after she impressed upon them how special the room was to her. The final straw was a short dark woman, the niece of a trusted customer, who left a sopping-wet cleaning rag draped across the keys of her computer, the computer that held every bit of business she conducted.

The wet towel on her computer was like a sharp pair of scissors left in a child’s crib. Lena couldn’t even bear to think about it and its implications.

Even black women who loved Lena couldn’t bring themselves to clean her house. Even the cleaning crew who kept her offices spotless swore they just didn’t know how to clean her house.

“Lord have mercy,” Sister said from her spotless home in a suburb east of New Orleans. “Grown black women claiming they don’t know how to clean a house. Shit, you could get Diahann Carroll to come in there with her heels and diamonds and flawless complexion and perfectly coiffed hair and she’d know enough not to sweep dirt in corners.”

It was Frank Petersen who finally called an end to the foolishness. Lena didn’t know when he did it or where he got the strength to pick up the phone and call his brother, but he did. He called James Petersen and said, “Brother, it’s time you came this way.”

James packed up his few clothes, his favorite books and a couple of unopened jigsaw puzzles in his cousin’s large suitcase and a dusty old steamer trunk he found back in a closet and left Arkansas that very day.

The sucking sound Cliona from Yamacraw was making with her drink brought Lena back to her big sitting room.

Finally, Cliona drained her glass and rattled the ice cubes a bit. Lena stopped herself just in time from saying, “Can I get you another, Miss Cliona?” There seemed nothing left for Cliona from Yamacraw to do but finally complete her mission.

“Now, I heard ’bout your little accident,” the old woman said.

Lena thought, Good God, if this ain’t the smallest town when it comes to news. I don’t know why we bother with radio and TV.

“Oh, Miss Cliona, I’m okay. I didn’t have any accident.”

“Yeah?” Cliona replied. “That ain’t what I heard. I heard you took a pretty bad lick to the head.”

“Oh, that was Mr. Jackson’s talk, you know the contractor doing the work down at The Place,” Lena said easily. “I just tripped and fell. He was just being overly cautious.”

“Um-huh,” Cliona said suspiciously. Then she caught herself and said, “Oh, Lena, baby, I didn’t mean no harm.” And she smiled, her false teeth—teeth Lena had paid for—big in her mouth. The last thing she wanted to do was call Lena, whom she had always thought of as her special little girl, a liar. Lena leaned forward a little toward the old woman and smiled back. So Cliona from Yamacraw just kept going.

“Well, I brought you some of this fresh Cleer Flo’ water. Collected it late last night right when it started. Powerful. Now, you take this water and …”

Cliona stopped and, covering her mouth with her wrinkled hand, began to laugh.

“Listen to me,” the old woman chuckled. “ ’Bout to go and tell you, a child born with a veil over her face, what to do with this Cleer Flo’.”

Lena just smiled politely.

“Thank you, Miss Cliona,” Lena said as she stood, took the bottle from the woman and reached down to hug her neck. Cliona from Yamacraw smelled faintly of the sweet scent of Dixie peach snuff.

The scent made Lena even more gentle in helping Cliona from Yamacraw on with her coat and ushering her out the door to the late-model van where a young cousin of the old woman’s waited with the motor running and the radio blasting. He turned the radio down and reached over to open the car door for his elderly cousin.

It was only after Lena had settled Cliona from Yamacraw in the
front passenger’s seat that she remembered why people said Cliona was a hard person to take leave of.

“Okay, now, Lena, baby, bye, now, sugar. See you later, sugar pie. Bye, now, baby. See you later, Lena, baby. Ha! See you later, tell you straighter, you know that one, Lena? Huh, Lena? Baby, you know that one? Well, I guess we going now, see you later, now, Lena, baby, sugar dumpling pie. Bye, baby. Bye, Lena. Bye, sugar. Bye, baby. Bye, Lena. Bye.”

Lena could hear her all the way down the road throwing adieus out the window as they drove off. She stood under the two-hundred-year-old pecan trees by the side of the driveway and chuckled at the goodbyes in the night. Then she wearily headed for her house.

I
’m gonna have to get something nice for Miss Cliona, Lena thought as she locked up the back door and began unbuttoning the tiny pearl buttons down the back of her creamy sweater. The gesture of putting her hands down her back reminded her of the little incident in her car that morning, but she just closed her eyes briefly and shook her braids around her neck to clear her head of the memory and the questions. The tips of her braids slipped down her sweater and brushed across the tender spot on her back and sent a shiver down her spine.

“Oh, quit!” she said in exasperation as she headed back down what she called “the Glass Hall.” Practically everything in Lena’s house had a name. Lena pretended she had forgotten all about the ghosts and such in her early life, but she had created reminders all over her house.

When folks teased her about the practice, Lena just laughed her rich throaty chuckle and said, “I name it and I claim it.” And she’d throw her head over her left shoulder the way her father did and laugh again.

That attitude was the reason she named the portentous overbearing overwhelming main room in her house “the Great Jonah Room” after her father. The sewing room was Grandmama’s. The big sunny kitchen was Nellie’s. Sometimes, she could hardly bear to go in there and warm up her food, it recalled such poignant memories of her mother. Her swimming pool was Rachel’s Waters. The stable and other outdoor buildings were named for her wild brothers, Raymond and Edward, because they had as boys loved so to rip and run and explore outside. And although he had died a teetotaler the year before she was born, Lena named the wine cellar after Granddaddy Walter.

All named for dead people and ghosts. Her family and loved ones were only alive in names of rooms and swimming pools and barns on her property.

She came back into the Great Jonah Room and went right to where she and Cliona had sat. Lena agreed with her mother’s assessment of Cliona from Yamacraw’s general sanity. But she picked up the bottle of river water in the Listerine mouthwash bottle, opened the black plastic cap and poured a few drops into the cup of her hand. Then, she held her head back, dipping her braids to the middle of her back, and splashed the cool clear water on her forehead like a rite of baptism.

Her head had stopped hurting, but talking with Mr. Jackson
and
Cliona from Yamacraw for the previous three hours had blown her pleasant woozy high from the shot in the hospital. Lena found her purse on the floor by the sofa and, with some ginger ale she poured over ice at the rolltop desk she used as a bar, took two of the yellow and orange capsules the young doctor at the hospital had given her in case she had any pain or trouble sleeping.

As she continued undressing, she sighed heavily, happy to be home. She kicked off her mules under the low table sculptured from a huge slab of live oak tree trunk in front of one of the aqua leather sofas. Her feet still ached a bit even out of her high-heeled shoes. Some nights, when she took her shoes off, she felt like Pearl Bailey
and wanted to exclaim, “Lord, these mules of mine are killing me! My feet! My feet!”

Dropping her sweater on the back of a high-back cane rocker, she walked to the oversized French doors overlooking the deck, her yard beyond and the river beyond that and threw them open. Many nights she slept with the alarm system off so she could leave the French doors on that side of the house open and feel the night air and the breeze from the river.

The railings around the edges of the sprawling winding cypress deck that wrapped around the house and a huge nearby oak tree were a mass of tiny white flowers and dark shiny cupped leaves that exuded a heavy exotically sweet smell all the way over to where Lena stood inside the door. The scent of the jasmine drew her to the door and outside.

She was surprised at the changes out there. It seemed that in the week since Sister had come through on her way to a year’s sabbatical in Sierra Leone and they had been out on the deck, vines and trees and plants on her property had exploded with color, scent and life. Azalea bushes that were mere shrubbery the week before were now mountains of white and pink and red blossoms. The weeping willows and weeping mulberry trees had been mere reeds blowing in the March wind. Now they were all—fifteen of them along the riverbanks—shimmering with the verdant haze of new growth.

Among the willows and mulberry and the azaleas and tangles of wisteria, a powwow of lightning bugs seemed to be assembling. Lena didn’t know when she had seen so many among her woods.

“It’s so early in the year, not even early summer, for them to be around,” she said as she stood there watching the fairy show the insects were putting on in the woods.

She had to chuckle as her gaze landed on the remnants of the ceremony she and Sister had performed out on the deck—”It’s best if it takes place outside,” Sister had said—in the light of the new moon.

“Lena, you
are
a little foolish fool,” she said to herself gently.

It had been a ceremony to summon up a man for Lena, a wonderful
man, a sexy man, a wise man, a generous-spirited man, a smart man, a funny man, a loyal man,
her
man.

All week, she had felt a little silly telling James Petersen not to disturb the site, but Sister had warned her not to move any of the elements of the ceremony (“Even if it rains”) or the rites would be void or the results turned inside out. James had silently shook his head, chuckled and said, “Okay.”

The half-burned candles; the silver and black snakeskin that was a twenty-five-year-old gift from her brother Edward, who was obsessed with reptiles; the vial of salt; the pictures of saints; the water from Florida. All the elements were still there.

They had both been a bit tipsy from the home brew Sister had smuggled in from her last trip to Guadeloupe. “Girl, as long as I have a piece of your hair or one of your fingernail clippings and your picture with me in the bag,” she would tell Lena all the time after some trip in which she had safely and easily brought back contraband, “I can get anything I want through any customs in the world. They just wave me on through.”

She had warned Lena, “This stuff is strong, yeah. This stuff don’t play,” when she set the tall recycled rum bottle on the deep long picnic table that had once sat in Lena’s family’s breakfast room. But they poured themselves a couple of fingers of the smooth strong brew into two crystal goblets. And while they stood and sampled from the pots of delicious food on the stove, they kept sipping.

“Shoot, Lena, I remember the kind of stuff you used to do down home at school and the dreams and night visions you told me about before we went to see Aunt Delphie in Vieux Carré,” Sister had said as she drew bottles rolled in brown paper with red twine twisted around them from a croaker sack in her carry-on bag she had placed on the breakfast room table. Then she brought out different-colored candles—white for peace, pink for love, red for winning. “And I know the rituals and stuff. So I don’t see any reason why the two of us together can’t call up just about anything we want.”